Archive for the ‘morality’ Category
Thursday, September 9th, 2010
The least pain in our little finger gives us more concern and uneasiness, than the destruction of millions of our fellow-beings. – William Hazlitt
As early as 1796, when he was just eighteen, the English essayist William Hazlitt may have become the first Westerner to see that self-concern is not rationally required.
Hazlitt published his insight in 1805, in his Essays on the Principles of Human Action. Introducing the 1990 edition, John Price informs us that “The reading public and the reviewing journals regarded it, for the most part, with indifference or hostility.” Hazlitt’s Essays and the idea they contain fell into obscurity for the best part of two centuries, after which the idea re-emerged independently as part of a new wave of thought about personal identity (more…)
Posted in anticipation, Barresi, Hazlitt, human replication, morality, motivation, Nozick, Parfit, personal identity, Raymond Martin, self interest, self-concern | No Comments »
Saturday, July 31st, 2010
We are strongly motivated to promote the interests of anyone for whom we feel self-concern. We are moved to prevent that person’s suffering, to work towards his or her well-being. Motivation seems part of self-concern’s essential core.
A focus on motivation suggests that self-concern is primarily future-directed. We know we cannot change the past, and do not normally try. But of course, our attitudes towards the past, as well as the future, are infected with self-concern. Most events I remember in my own past are coloured by pride or shame, personal joy or pain. Most of my memories of my own life have associated emotions which are qualitatively distinct from my memories of other people’s lives, and of events to which I had no personal connection.
Our mental models of reality include both past and future. We imagine both (not always accurately). But the imagined past is labelled, in our models, as fixed, beyond help. The imagined future (and there are many) is flagged as possible. The past is manifest, fixed, immutable. The future is unmanifest, mutable, a realm of possibilities not actualities. The ‘flow of time’ might be described as the production of the actual from the possible. (more…)
Posted in anticipation, Avatar, morality, motivation, personal identity, philosophy, Raymond Martin, self interest, self-concern | No Comments »
Friday, April 23rd, 2010
Neurologists have demonstrated plasticity in the spatial sense of self, or body-image. Not only are the ‘phantom limbs’ of amputees somewhat malleable, under special circumstances (and also remarkably intractable under others), but we can be induced to perceive a detached rubber hand, lying on a table, as our own hand, and even to feel that the table-top itself is part of our own body. But how plastic, if at all, are our ideas of ourselves extended into the future and the past?
Published in 1970, Bernard Williams’ “The Self and the Future” is one of the seminal papers that gave rise to the contemporary philosophical debate on personal identity. Williams presents two series of thought-experiments, which lead his own intuitions in opposite directions on the question whether a future person, described as having a certain relationship to his present self, would be himself or someone else. One set of cases tends to persuade him that what matters in personal identity – the relation that makes us the same person over time – is psychological continuity. The other set of cases makes him think that bodily continuity is more important. Williams reports being left “not in the least clear” which is right.
Williams presents this as a philosophical problem. I suggest it is more fruitfully regarded as an experimental result – a single data-point in a psychological experiment, with Williams as both subject and experimenter. If repeated with a larger, and less contaminated, sample population, such an experiment could shed the light of empirical research on the question with which I opened this post. I hope someone will undertake such a study, which could lead in interesting directions. (more…)
Posted in Cotard's, Golden Rule, Metzinger, mind transplant, Nozick, personal identity, psychology, Raymond Martin, self, self interest, self-concern, thought experiment, Williams | 1 Comment »
Wednesday, April 7th, 2010
Who would have predicted that boring old life insurance would become the ‘killer app’ that makes human replication technology truly transformational? But that does seem to follow from the logic of the situation.
The arguments for information-based life insurance are even more compelling than the arguments for teleportation. The advantages of travelling as information are speed, convenience, cost, and sustainability (in the form of lower carbon emissions). The final product is the same as conventional travel – the customer is (to all intents and purposes) transported from place A to place B. But in the case of life insurance, the product is radically transformed. Whereas traditional insurance merely mitigates the damage of death by providing monetary support to surviving family, the new insurance warrants the life of the policyholder by – in the event of his death – restoring him from a backup file. It changes our relationship to death, which is no small matter. (more…)
Posted in death, ethics, human replication, life insurance, mologram, Moore's Law, morality, personal identity, philosophy, Ponce de Leon, psychology, rejuvenation, self, self interest, self-concern, thought experiment | No Comments »
Friday, February 26th, 2010
What are we, if we are informational entities?
Like most people (and unlike some philosophers) I will stick to the view that we are persons. In this post I will try to state clearly what persons are according to the theory of persons I recommend, which I call the Information Theory. I will begin to flesh the theory out, by drawing out some of its consequences.
The Information Theory
Here are some claims of the Information Theory of Persons.
- Persons are entities that can be multiply instantiated, like tunes, dances, literary works, electronic files, computer programs, and genes.
- Like all those things, persons are entities that can be expressed as information. A person can cross a spatio-temporal gap in the form of information carried by any convenient medium, such as electronic files.
- Persons are distinct from the living biological organisms they depend on, as software is distinct from the hardware it runs on. (more…)
Posted in anosognosia, death, evolution, human replication, identity, Kamitani, neuroscience, Parfit, personal identity, philosophy, Pro-Life, psychology, Ramachandran, religion, sanctity of life, self, self interest, teleportation, Trivers | No Comments »
